Portrait of a Man Unknown by Nathalie Sarraute

First published:Portrait d’un inconnu, 1948 (English translation, 1958)

Type of work: Experimental fiction

Time of work: The late 1940’s

Locale: Paris and an unnamed Dutch city (probably Amsterdam)

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a sensitive man who looks for the unconscious “movements” behind people’s words and actions
• The Daughter, a strange old maid who has a difficult relationship with her father
• The Father, an old miser who believes that his daughter is trying to rob him
• Louis Dumontet, an employee of the Finance Ministry who becomes the daughter’s fiance

The Novel

Portrait of a Man Unknown has no plot in the traditional sense. It describes the narrator’s search for reality, his attempts to discover the truth about the relationship between an old man and his daughter. Like a detective, he spies on them and even imagines scenes between them at which he is not present.

The narrator’s method of exploration consists of seeing and imagining what Nathalie Sarraute has called “tropisms.” In her introduction to Tropismes (1938; Tropisms, 1963), she defined tropisms as movements, “hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives,” which “slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations.” These movements “hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing, and able to define.” She called them tropisms “because of their spontaneous, irresistible, instinctive nature, similar to that of the movements made by certain living organisms under the influence of outside stimuli, such as light or heat.”

The novel explores the theme of the “mask,” or false face, which the father puts on every time he sees his daughter. The narrator compares it with the mask worn by Prince Bolkonski in Leo Tolstoy’s Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886) to hide his powerful love for his daughter, Princess Marie. The prince’s mask slipped once on his deathbed when he called Marie “my little friend” or “my little soul”; no one heard exactly what he said. The narrator wonders why the prince would need to hide his love from his daughter, who was perfectly pure and innocent—or was she? The old man’s daughter was probably not perfectly innocent, even as a baby. She seemed like a monster to him as her strident cry and “tentacles” made him “secrete” the mask the first time. Prince Bolkonski and Princess Marie are real characters in a real novel—solid, defined, explained. The narrator wishes that real life were like that; then he could feel confident, secure.

At the urging of his parents, he goes to see a specialist (psychologist? psychiatrist? literary critic?) who convinces him that tropisms do not exist, that he is oversensitive and neurotic, suffering from “introversion.” The doctor suggests that he take a trip to complete the cure.

On a visit to an art museum in Holland, he rediscovers the painting whose name provides the title of the novel. “The Portrait of a Man Unknown,” also called “The Man with the Waistcoat,” is doubly unknown. Not only is the man’s name unknown, but the name of the artist is unknown as well. This unfinished picture exercises a mysterious charm over the narrator, who is fascinated by the groping, uncertain lines which seem to have been drawn by a blindman. It appears that the artist was interrupted in the process of creation by a sudden, fatal catastrophe. Only the eyes of the portrait still seem alive to the narrator. He feels them calling to him.

The narrator returns to Paris and continues imagining tropisms about the father. In front of his table, reading children’s schoolbooks, the old man feels secure, but behind his apparent serenity and feeling of detachment is an anxiety which wakes him up in the middle of the night. The narrator imagines him suffering because he believes that his daughter is draining the life from him, sucking away his substance. Barefoot, in his nightshirt, the man rushes to the kitchen to verify that his daughter has cut off and stolen part of his bar of soap. Tormented by these thoughts, he is unable to go back to sleep all night.

In the longest and most important scene of the novel, which the narrator presumably imagines, the daughter and the father, compared to two dung beetles, lock horns in an epic battle. She has come to shame him into giving her money for medical care. He believes that she is being taken advantage of by charlatans who want to bilk him of his money. When he seems to be losing, the father asks her why she does not get married and have someone else support her. She unexpectedly replies that she is engaged. He pushes her out of the room and locks the door, but she begs and grovels until he spitefully throws some money at her. Then she leaves, quite satisfied with herself.

The narrator’s final encounter with the father and daughter is a chance meeting in a restaurant where they are dining with Louis Dumontet, the daughter’s fiance. Dumontet is a “real” character with a name and a complete physical description. He resembles the father and even has a bunion on his toe like him. Dumontet is powerful and sure of himself. In his presence all the tropisms vanish. When the daughter leaves with Dumontet, the narrator returns home to find that things are clean, smooth, solid, and pure. His world has taken on the serene look of dead people’s faces. Without tropisms everything is dead.

The Characters

The subject of this novel is how to create characters in a literary work. Sarraute started with a situation worthy of a traditional novel, the relationship between a miser and his old maid daughter. This is the same subject, Sarraute points out, as that of Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (1833; English translation, 1859). Balzac, however, begins his novel with a thirty-page description of the town, street, and house where his characters live in order to explain their personalities. Then he moves on to describe them psychologically and physically in great detail, including the wart on Grandet’s nose which inspired Dumontet’s bunion.

Sarraute gives very few details of the miser’s house, only a brief description of the wallpaper and an incidental mention of a leaky pipe. With the exception of Dumontet, who is intended as a parody of traditional characters, none of her characters has a name. The protagonists are referred to as “he,” “she,” and “I.” Sarraute’s characters are constantly changing as the narrator gains new insights into their personalities. In the interminable warfare between the father and the daughter, neither the narrator nor the reader is certain who is telling the truth. Possibly the doctors are charlatans and the daughter is trying to pry her father’s substance from him; possibly the daughter is the innocent victim of an egotistical miser. As in life outside novels, the reader can never know for sure.

The narrator longs to know the truth. He wants to give people names, to make them into the characters of a traditional novel—smooth, solid, and finished. He wants to put labels on them, to call her a maniac and him a miser. He suspects, however, that things are not as simple as that, that this solid mass is really a veneer which will crack, or that it is a mask built from the cliches and commonplaces of language. From behind the mask or through the crack oozes the disgusting liquid which is life.

The painting called “The Portrait of a Man Unknown” illustrates how Sarraute thinks characters should be formed: with the unsteady, groping hand of a blindman. Characters should not be pure, smooth, solid, and finished but uncertain, changing, vacillating with the rapid movements called tropisms.Only the eyes of the unknown man are alive. A work of art should shine with the life and power of those eyes.

Critical Context

Sarraute’s early works, Tropisms, Portrait of a Man Unknown, and Martereau (1953; English translation, 1959), received almost no critical attention until the late 1950’s. By that time, the literary movement called the New Novel had awakened the French reading public to the possibilities of experimental fiction. The republication of Portrait of a Man Unknown in 1956 coincided with that of a collection of critical essays called L’Ere du soupcon (1956; The Age of Suspicion, 1963), which explored the evolution of the novel form.

Along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute came to be considered a leader and a theorist of the New Novel movement. This movement challenged traditional concepts of plot and characters in a novel, seeing them as outmoded and in need of renewal.

Portrait of a Man Unknown illustrates the principles expressed in The Age of Suspicion and forms a transition between Tropisms and Martereau. Like Portrait of a Man Unknown, Martereau has a first-person narrator who perceives the tropisms. After Martereau, Sarraute moved beyond the first-person narrator to fragment the central consciousness, dispersing it among all the “characters.”

Portrait of a Man Unknown contains the seeds of all Sarraute’s subsequent novels. In its preoccupation with the relationship between the artist and reality, it squarely poses the dilemma which she examines in her later works. As one of the first New Novels, its experimentation with novelistic techniques was a useful example for younger writers who developed the “New Novel” into the “new New Novel.” Finally, its critique of the banality of conversation and its examination of other issues surrounding the use of language contributed to the structuralist and deconstruction movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Bibliography

Besser, Gretchen Rous. Nathalie Sarraute, 1979.

Mercier, Vivian. The New Novel: From Queneau to Pinget, 1971.

Minogue, Valerie. Nathalie Sarraute and the War of Words, 1981.

Temple, Ruth Z. Nathalie Sarraute, 1968.

Tison-Braun, Micheline. Nathalie Sarraute: Ou, La Recherche de l’authenticite, 1971.